The first Citizinvestor project in the City of Boston has been funded!

We are thrilled to share with you that the first Citizinvestor project in the City of Boston has been funded!

In just 55 days, 47 Citizinvestors stepped up to the plate to donate $6,480 to put iPads and other technology in the hands of 10 blind students in Boston. If you’ve seen this video from one of the students who has gone through the program in the past, you know why these Citizinvestors invested in this worthy cause:

This is a huge milestone for Citizinvestor and the movement for crowdfunding local government and civic projects. Having only launched our pilot program in Philadelphia and Boston less than three months ago, citizens have already proven that they will fund the civic projects they care about most.

We can’t wait to see what projects citizens will fund next in Philadelphia, Boston and other cities across the United States!

Introducing the Citizinvestor Board of Advisors

The problems we are trying to solve at Citizinvestor are big and audacious. While we are brave enough to attack these challenges head on, it’s clear we don’t have all the answers. Today, we are honored to announce that four highly-respected professionals in government and technology will begin advising our team and steering Citizinvestor through some of the company’s most critical decisions. Without further adieu, allow us to introduce you to these amazing people:

Marci Harris is the CEO of POPVOX. POPVOX bridges the gap between the input the public wants to provide and the information Members of Congress want and need to receive. Marci began public service work as Tornado Recovery Coordinator for Jackson, Tenn., working with private and public organizations and state, local and federal agencies to marshall resources and rebuild. In 2007, she became Tax, Trade, and Health Counsel to Pete Stark, then-Chairman of the Health Subcommittee of Ways and Means, and was Committee lead for Medicare Program Integrity and Physician Payments Sunshine provisions of the House health reform bill. She left the Hill in February 2010 to build POPVOX.

Steve Ressler is the Founder and President of GovLoop.com, the “Knowledge Network for Government” which connects and fosters collaboration among over 60,000 members of the government community. Mr. Ressler is a 3rd generation public sector leader and spent 6 years in roles at Social Security Administration, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, and DHS Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
 

Patrick Ruffini is president at Engage, a digital agency with clients including Fortune 500 companies, Presidential and statewide candidates, technology startups, and issue advocacy campaigns. As a leader in digital politics over the last decade, Ruffini’s work has helped elect a President, changed the direction of powerful institutions, and resulted in millions of signups, tens of millions of dollars raised, and thousands of blog and media mentions.

Russell Wallace is a three-time startup founder and a former corporate attorney. Since quitting the law in 2009, he has worked on 5 different consumer-facing web properties and has founded or co-founded 3, including Trendero.com, MomiLoop and CivicSponsor.org, one of the first crowdfunding sites for government projects. His goal is to build big ideas that make the world more friendly, open and adventurous.

In 8 days, we have our first successfully signed Citizinvestor petition!

It only took 8 days for the bicycle community of St. Petersburg, Florida to rally around this successful petition for the City to install bike pumps and fix stations along the area’s bike lanes!

We wanted to take this moment to celebrate with the 100+ citizens who signed this petition and to explain how the petition process works moving forward. Now that the petition has reached its target number of signatures, we will work with the petition’s creator (Reuben Pressman) to set up a meeting with the appropriate people inside the City of St. Petersburg or Pinellas County. Reuben will then have the ability to pitch his idea to the government entity, with the tangible support of 100 St. Petersburg residents at his back. Citizinvestor will work with the municipality to introduce them to our platform and encourage them to post the project on Citizinvestor where it can raise the funds necessary for these bike pumps to be installed!

To check out this awesome petition, visit http://www.citizinvestor.com/petition/bike-pump-and-fix-stations. To start your own petition, visit http://www.citizinvestor.com/start/petition.

Welcome Matt Morse to the Citizinvestor team!

We are thrilled to announce that Matt Morse has joined the Citizinvestor team as our lead Community Partner!

For eight years, Matt has worked in the technology management and public policy fields. He served as a federal and state lobbyist at The Pew Charitable Trusts, including advocacy for the passage and implementation of legislation in Congress and 10 states.

Matthew also worked for three years as the project manager for Pew’s Voting Information Project (VIP), where he worked closely with Citizinvestor Co-founder, Jordan Raynor. VIP is a partnership between the Pew Center on the States, state election offices, major technology companies, and voter engagement groups to provide information to help voters navigate the election process by leveraging Internet technologies.

At Citizinvestor, Matt will be leading our efforts to secure projects from municipalities and build relationships with civic leaders. This will culminate in better organized communities unified to fund and support these projects. Matt is incredibly talented and is well respected by leaders in this space. He will be a huge asset to Citizinvestor as we continue to secure partnerships with some of the largest and most innovative cities in the U.S. to crowdfund the projects citizens care about most.

Be sure to follow Matt on Twitter, and if you’re interested in reading about the rest of our team, you can check us out at our new team page: http://citizinvestor.com/about

A community of micro-philanthropists

In grade school, we began learning the word “philanthropist” - a term usually tied to the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the world - the philanthropists who, through their generosity, helped build a nation. We grew up respecting these men and women, admiring them for their investments in their neighborhoods and communities.

So what does a philanthropist look like in the 21st century? There are certainly contemporary examples such as Bill and Melinda Gates, Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett who give millions of dollars to causes each year. But at Citizinvestor, we don’t believe that you have to have millions of dollars to be a philanthropist in the 21st century. In fact, all you need is a few dollars.

We believe that “philanthropy” differentiates itself from other forms of giving in that it is big, public and tangible.

Big

Traditional philanthropists built big things: libraries, universities and the U.N. Today’s micro-philanthropists are building big things too: bridges, a Nikola Tesla museum and, as Clay Shirky would point out, Wikipedia! Shirky says in his great book, Here Comes Everybody, “We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.”

Public

Dictionary.com defines philanthropy as “private initiatives for public good.” Both traditional and micro-philanthropists understand this well. Philanthropic gifts are meant to be for the good of all men, or in the case of Citizinvestor, for the good of all citizens. This is probably why the “city of brotherly love” was the first to post a project on Citizinvestor! The projects posted to Citizinvestor come from local government entities and are inherently public, thus attracting a community of micro-philanthropists who feel compelled to take initiative for public good.

Tangible

In the 19th and 20th centuries, it was near impossible to do anything philanthropic that was truly tangible if you didn’t have millions of dollars. Today that is not the case. Our favorite example of this is Charity Water who does a fantastic job of making big gifts tangible even if you have only donated $5 to build a water well in Africa. With Citizinvestor, tangible outcomes are possible for the micro-philanthropist who only has a few dollars to spare to build a park, playground or plant a tree.

At Citizinvestor, we are creating a community of “micro-phlanthropists” where anyone can choose specific projects to fund in their neighborhoods and see that investment come to life to make their neighborhood a better place. In effect, we are democratizing philanthropy. So what do you say? Want to help us build a community of modern-day Carnegies and Rockefellers with just a few dollars? Check out this great project from Philadelphia or start a petition of your own!

Launched!

And we’re off!

This morning, we launched Citizinvestor as a pilot program in the City of Philadelphia! We are thrilled to announce that Philly has become one of the first cities in the world to crowdfund city projects, and we’re honored to say they are doing it on Citizinvestor.

This is truly something that has never been done before. For the first time in history, we  are giving citizens the ability to tell government precisely where they want their money spent.

Starting today, Philadelphians can visit Citizinvestor.com to find and invest in the local projects they care about most, starting with TreePhilly, a campaign led by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PP&R) in partnership with Wells Fargo and Fairmount Park Conservancy that directly engages Philadelphia property owners, businesses and neighbors to plant and maintain trees. Through Citizinvestor, citizens can now micro-fund the planting of these trees across the city. Citizens’ credit cards will only be charged if the project reaches 100% of its funding goal. At that point, the trees will be disbursed to citizens to plant!

While Philadelphia is the first city to post projects to the site, today we are giving citizens in all U.S. cities the ability to petition their local governments to initiate the projects they care about most. Once a citizen-started petition reaches its target number of signatures, we will work with the citizen who started the petition to introduce the idea to the appropriate individuals in their local government and will work to try to get the petition turned into a project on Citizinvestor.

Mayor Nutter’s office has been a fantastic partner on this project, as have been the dozens other cities we are currently working with to post projects to the site. We can’t wait to launch projects in your city!

With today’s launch, we begin the work of creating a community of micro-philanthropists across America. It’s a monumental task, but one that we believe we are uniquely suited to succeed at. Thank you for taking this journey with us!

Thank you, StartUp RockOn!

Last week, StartUp RockOn named Citizinvestor the recipients of the first StartUp RockOn Grant Challenge!

We would like to say a special thank you to StartUp RockOn founder Ryan Costello of EventFarm, Lee Brenner of HyperVocal and Kwasi Asare of Fighter Interactive. Thank you for what you are doing to help celebrate startups guys!

Can Civic Crowdfunding Kickstart Urban Innovation?

Matthew Hall from the team at Neighborland has published a fantastic post on Shareable Cities outlining how civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor can help “kickstart” urban innovation. It’s a piece you can’t miss. Here are a few of our favorite excerpts: 

Although securing funding for projects civic or otherwise is still difficult, crowdfunding sites can offer an alternative to the standard gridlock of funding public projects. Currently if an individual or nonprofit wants to get their project funded they have to raise the money through their connections. Putting their projects online gives them a better chance of reaching beyond the resources they personally know. Plus, sites that are dedicated to funding civic projects will attract people who are interested in those types of projects creating a multiplier where more projects bring in more people to fund them, whereas searching for grants and offline donations does not have quite the same effect.

Although crowdfunding can be an alternative route to getting civic projects funded, a frequent criticism of the crowdfunding model is that civic projects should be funded through taxes and managed by city governments. Caitlyn Duer wrote, “we pay taxes, we vote, and the person we vote into office directs our tax money into the projects we want to see.” The view that government should be able cover every civic need is unreasonably idealistic. It would be ideal if taxes paid for everything, but there is a difference between the way things should be and the way they are. Waiting for government should do a better job has proven to be an ineffective strategy.

Crowdfunding gives people the opportunity to decide the terms of their civic involvement. They can choose to support projects they like and this gives them a greater connection with their city and its future. Civic crowdfunding is an opportunity to engage more people in these processes and open up more financial resources so that more projects can be funded, not all but more.

Read the entire piece on Shareable Cities.

First screenshots of Citizinvestor revealed

We are thrilled to unveil the first screenshots of Citizinvestor, set to launch in just a few weeks! Take a look below and let us know what you think!

Note: the projects displayed above are for demonstration purposes only.

GovFresh profiles Citizinvestor

Thanks to Luke Fretwell and the team at GovFresh (one of our favorite blogs) for this great profile on Citizinvestor! Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Citizinvestor is the latest startup to tackle public budget woes by offsetting lack of public funding with crowdsourced citizen donations targeted to specific projects. Citizinvestor founders Tony DeSisto, Jordan Raynor and Erik Rapprich share their vision.

What’s the story behind starting Citizinvestor?

One of our co-founders, Tony DeSisto, is an attorney who currently serves on the City of Tampa’s Budget Advisory Committee. On the Committee, Tony consults with the city on budgeting issues, trying to find new and innovative ways to fund local government projects at a time in which budgets at city Halls are tighter than ever before. Seeing the crowdfunding trend, Tony thought there needed to be a platform where citizens can micro-fund the local government projects they really want to see built. Thus, Citizinvestor was born.

We are planning to launch in late July in two major pilot partner cities, one of which is one of the five most populated cities in America. We expect to roll Citizinvestor out to new cities nearly every month.

Brief bios on the other two co-founders can be found below:

Jordan Raynor is a digital strategist who has spent his career solving difficult problems in government, politics and technology. Jordan most recently served as Client Director at Engage – deemed a “mega interactive agency” by Mashable. At Engage, Jordan’s primary client was the Voting Information Project – an initiative that works with election officials to put polling place location data in a uniform format. Jordan was honored as a Google Fellow at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum.

Erik Rapprich is a web director, developer and strategist. Most recently, Erik served as Creative Director at Engage, where he met Jordan. At Engage, Erik lead product strategy for Multiply and iContribute – products used by leaders like John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and Bob McDonnell. In 2010, Erik served as Web Director for the Republican Governors Association, managing a team that created 38 websites and applications in five months.

Be sure to check out the full profile on GovFresh!

Citizinvestor named a finalist for Code for America’s Accelerator

A few weeks ago, we shared with you a portion of our application for Code for America’s inaugural Accelerator.

Today, we are happy to announce that we have been named as 1 of 15 finalists for the program out of an astonishing 235 applicants!

At the time we received notice of our finalist status, Citizinvestor was only 8 weeks old. In those 8 weeks, we had developed the first version of our application, met with 8 of the 25 most populated cities in America, secured two pilot partner cities and been named a finalist in Code for America’s amazing program. And we’ve only just begun!

Thank you for joining us in this exciting venture!

Subway tripping video highlights a project perfect for Citizinvestor

If you haven’t seen it already, be sure to watch Brooklyn resident Dean Peterson’s video of numerous New Yorkers tripping on the stairs at the 36th Street subway station:

While the video is humorous, it also highlights a very real and practical problem. This is a problem that hundreds of New Yorkers face every day and it is likely a fairly inexpensive one for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to fix. 

According to a report by NBC New York this morning, “[MTA] crews went to the station Wednesday to block off the staircase in preparation for repairs. It’s not clear what the fix will entail, or how long it will take.”

The public pressure created by the virality of the above video (461,000 views in the first 22 hours) will likely force MTA to fix the problem immediately. But for anyone who lives in or has visited New York knows, this isn’t the only subway station that is in desperate need of minor repairs that will make a huge difference. It is likely that there are numerous small subway projects like this that New York City’s government and MTA have scored and approved, but simply don’t have the money for.

That’s where Citizinvestor comes in. This video highlights a great example of a project that will be perfect to fund on our platform when we launch next month. The project is a small dollar one (likely 4 or 5 figures) that obviously affects numerous citizens in the neighborhood surrounding the 36th Street subway station. There’s no question in our minds that the citizens that trip over the stairs every morning would gladly pitch in $20-$30 to get this problem fixed for good.

A note to the MTA: if you don’t have the budget to fix the stair, give us a shout at info@citizinvestor.com and we will put the project up on Citizinvestor.com where citizens can fund the project in full.

Crowdfunding the National Debt?

As we get closer to launching Citizinvestor in two very exciting pilot cities (stay tuned to hear who they are), we are actively listening to what the Twitterverse has to say about crowdfunding for local government and civic projects. Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen some rather humorous proposals tweeted, but none compare to this one:

You know, with everyone starting a Kickstarter, how soon will it be before the government does one to try and fix the national debt?

— Jonathan Long (@Weezul) June 19, 2012

We realize it’s audacious, but we have many reasons to believe that citizens will step-up to the plate and crowdfund the local government projects they care about most. But the national debt? Probably not. This humorous exaggeration of what crowdfunding for government projects might look like gives us the perfect opportunity to explain to the world the types of projects we are focusing on funding with Citizinvestor.

In the past 4 weeks, we have had the opportunity to meet with 8 of the 25 most populated cities in America to discuss the types of projects they will be posting to Citizinvestor when we launch. The projects we and our city partners are focused on can best be described as “micro-projects” - four or five figure projects that are one-time capital expenditures. These are projects like parklets, bike racks and LED street lights, not indefinite funding for a soup kitchen, building a bridge or ending the national debt.

This is not to say that Citizinvestor will not be used to crowdfund a bridge at some point down the road (pun intended), but as we launch a new brand in our pilot cities, we will be narrowly focused on funding micro-projects that we believe will have a tremendous chance of success.

3 reasons why we believe citizens will financially invest in local government projects

Our entire business model hinges on this question: Will citizens financially invest in local government projects? The truth is, we don’t know the answer; but that’s ok, because neither does anyone else as no one has attempted to do what we are doing with Citizinvestor.

We believe that citizens will indeed financially invest in the local government projects they care most about. Here are three reasons why:

1. If they don’t, these projects may never happen. Let’s face it, the budget forecast for municipalities across the United States is bleak and looking bleaker each year. With less money to go towards projects that fall outside of essential government services, citizens are being forced to find new ways to get the projects they want built today. Some may argue that the projects municipalities post to Citizinvestor should be paid for by government today. Well, the fact is, government isn’t funding these projects and budgets for these types of projects are deferred year after year. If it’s a project citizens feel passionately enough about, we are confident that they will be willing to rally with their neighbors to microfund the project and bring it to life. 
2. History suggests that citizens will step up to financially invest in projects they truly care about. The idea that citizens will privately fund certain local government projects they really care about is not a new one. For decades citizens have raised money to save parks, renovate pools and build bridges. Citizinvestor is making this process easier and more scalable than ever before. In the past, most local government projects that would have incited this level of citizen interest were projects that cost millions of dollars and had regional appeal. Citizinvestor will give projects big and small and equal chance of being funded by the crowd. 
3. We are seeing great success with this model overseas. As we have pointed out on this blog in the past, we are seeing some really interesting and successful case studies of citizens investing in civic projects overseas. The Guardian just published a great article featuring the impact crowdsourcing civic projects is having in communities in the U.K. In it, a local Mayor said of the effect of his citizens crowdfunding a community centre, “It gee’d the community up and they increased their participation when they saw money coming in on the internet…the whole atmosphere on the estate changed when they realised it was going to become a reality. Now the building has started going up and there’s a real buzz.” Another UK resident said of a project to transform a derelict London dock into a river walkway in time for the Olympics “The crowdsourcing platform is a fantastic opportunity to engage people in regeneration and give them ownership of it. Thousands of people can visit a site they have pledged £2 towards and see what they helped build.” We are confident that this model will meet similar success in the U.S. as Americans are given the choice to tell government exactly where to spend their dollars for the first time ever. 

But enough about what we think, we want to hear from you! Do you agree or disagree with our premise that, if given the opportunity, citizens will financially invest in the local government projects they care about most?

Long live the Queen! And the crowdsourcing model for civic projects.

A few weeks ago, we introduced you to an interesting crowdfunding project in the Netherlands to build a bridge. Today, we would like to introduce you to another crowdfunding initiative from across the pond - this time, a giant floating replica of the Queen of England’s head.

Yes, you read that right. This odd and interesting project was successfully crowdfunded on Spacehive.com - a “funding platform for neighbourhood improvement projects” in the UK.

We are big fans of what Spacehive is doing. In fact, it’s very similar to what we are building here in the US with Citizinvestor. However, there is one fundamental and significant difference between Spacehive’s model and what we are building with Citizinvestor.

We believe that having citizens crowdfund civic projects will work best when projects have already been scored and approved by a government entity. We believe the best approach is to ensure that there is government buy-in for a project before citizens invest, that way they can be confident that if the project meets its funding goal, it will be built.

That said, we also believe that there must be a place for citizens to come to organize projects that municipalities either haven’t approved or haven’t thought of yet. Citizinvestor will give citizens the ability to propose the projects they want with petitions that, once reaching a certain number of signatures, we will help usher through the proper government channels.

Using crowdfunding to fund civic projects is a new and innovative idea. We are not saying there’s a right or wrong way to do it, but this is our way. We would love to hear what you think!